Drilling operations for the South Pole Ice Core (SPICEcore) project

• Published in: Annals of Glaciology
• Main Authors: Jay A. Johnson, Tanner Kuhl, Grant Boeckmann, Chris Gibson, Joshua Jetson, Zachary Meulemans, Kristina Slawny, Joseph M. Souney
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press 2021
• Subjects: Ice core; ice drilling; ice engineering; Meteorology. Climatology; QC851-999; East Antarctica; Austral; South Pole; Annals of Glaciology; Antarc*; Antarctica; ice core; South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1017/aog.2020.64; https://doaj.org/article/8e301096f2be46498466326b542f1eb7

Over the course of the 2014/15 and 2015/16 austral summer seasons, the South Pole Ice Core project recovered a 1751 m deep ice core at the South Pole. This core provided a high-resolution record of paleoclimate conditions in East Antarctica during the Holocene and late Pleistocene. The drilling and core processing were completed using the new US Intermediate Depth Drill system, which was designed and built by the US Ice Drilling Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In this paper, we present and discuss the setup, operation, and performance of the drill system.